fire

This Memorial Day weekend, the Bureau of Land Management hopes people can get out and enjoy the beautiful landscapes of Wyoming. But they also want to make sure that people are doing their part to prevent any unnecessary wildfires on public lands.

Home insurance is becoming a more uncertain market, in large part due to climate-fueled disasters like wildfires. Some states in the West are taking steps to address the situation, like Oregon where a 2023 law requires insurers to account for home-hardening measures in their underwriting models. In California, they’re trying to take it a step further.

Many Indigenous peoples in North America have long standing traditions of cultural burning, the deliberate ignition of fires for a wide array of purposes. With the robust participation of tribal members, a new paper tries to quantify the scale of past burning by the Karuk people of Northern California.

It made national headlines in October 2022 when Forest Service burn boss Ricky Snodgrass was arrested while overseeing a prescribed fire in rural Oregon. Now, a year and a half later, Snodgrass has been indicted on a misdemeanor reckless burning charge. The union he’s a member of is hopeful that he won’t be found guilty, but a representative says the case has still had impacts.

Grassroots Wildland Firefighters gathered well over 13,000 signatures on a petition demanding action from Congress on the looming pay cliff for federal firefighters. There are several legislative fixes in play, but the Sept. 30 deadline is fast approaching and legislators are on recess until the middle of next month.

The nation’s recent heat wave is quickly drying out vegetation, which is leading land officials around the West to issue fire warnings and restrictions.

Less than three months remain before federal wildland firefighters see their pay cut substantially – unless Congress intervenes soon. To raise pressure on legislators, Grassroots Wildland Firefighters has started circulating a petition demanding swift action, and in just a few days it has already gotten nearly 8,000 signatures.

In the first of five expected rounds of grant applications, the federal government awarded nearly $180 million to communities across the country to fund projects to reduce wildfire risk. Montana-based Headwaters Economics evaluated how well that first round met the goals of prioritizing high-risk, low-income and disaster-impacted communities. The short answer is pretty well, but there’s still room for improvement, especially when it comes to poorer communities with limited local government staff.

New research from the National Institute of Standards and Technology shows that moving sheds farther away from homes is one way homeowners can reduce wildfire risk.

Twenty-two-year-old Lorna Roxanne Green appeared in court Friday morning. A grand jury charged her for setting Wellspring Health Access in Casper on fire last May. The attack delayed the clinic’s opening from June 2022 to April of this year.